An examination of eyetracking artifacts related to website design for individuals with cognitive disability

This paper examines different eyetracking artifacts that were generated by cognitively disabled individuals as they were exposed to a series of websites which had similar content but different design factors. It is an extension of previous work, undertaken to determine if eyetracking data might further explain web usability findings relating to these individuals. The websites were presented to users who were suffering from different types of cognitive disabilities on which they performed a series of search tasks. The websites were scored by a heuristic defining the impact of the design factors on each website to create a difficulty spectrum that allowed the websites to be split in two groups, difficult and easy. Eyetracking artifacts from the users were compared against the difficult and easy website groups to see if there was any difference in user eye behavior. Differences in user activity related to saccades and information search were found to be significant.